Professional Activities

See full CV for more details.

Short CV

since 2018: Full Professor  for Cryptography and Privacy Engineering (ENCRYPTO) at the Department of Computer Science of Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

2012-2018: Independent Research Group Leader and head of the Engineering Cryptographic Protocols Group (ENCRYPTO) at the Department of Computer Science of Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

2011: Postdoctoral Researcher in the System Security Lab at Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

2008-2011: Doctoral Researcher (Dr.-Ing., equivalent to PhD) and Research Assistant at Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security (HGI) in the System Security Lab at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.

• PhD Thesis: "Engineering Secure Two-Party Computation Protocols - Advances in Design, Optimization, and Applications of Efficient Secure Function Evaluation" advised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi and Prof. Benny Pinkas.

2007: Research Internship at Nokia Bell Labs, Security Solutions/Cryptographic Systems, Murray-Hill, NJ, USA on "Practical Secure Function Evaluation" (host: Vladimir Kolesnikov, PhD).

2003-2008: Diploma (Dipl.-Inf. Univ., equivalent to M.Sc.) in Computer Science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. See MyWebsite@FAU for details. 

• Master Thesis: "Practical Secure Function Evaluation" advised by Vladimir Kolesnikov, PhD and Prof. Dr. Volker Strehl.

• Bachelor Thesis: "Secure Task Migration and Interprocess Communication in Reconfigurable, Distributed, Embedded Systems" advised by Dr.-Ing. Dirk Koch and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Teich.

Research

See also List of Publications (most indexed by DBLP and Google Scholar).

I am doing research in privacy, cryptographic protocols, applied cryptography, and computer security (for details see ENCRYPTO list of research topics):

• Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Applications

  • Private Set Intersection and Mobile Contact Discovery (see here)

  • Private Speech Processing

  • Genomic Privacy

• Secure  Computation Protocols and Compilers

  • Secure Two-Party Computation (see ABY)

  • Private Function Evaluation (see  UC)

• Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

  • Secure Evaluation of ML classifiers like Branching Programs, Neural Networks, and Sum-Product Networks

• Hardware-Assisted Cryptographic Protocols

• Cloud Computing Security (see AMID)

The following word clouds show for my publications the 50 most frequent keywords in the titles and the publication venues.

For my collaborations, see List of Coauthors. My Erdős Number equals 3; the path is T. Schneider - J. Buchmann - K. Győry - P. Erdős.

Projects

I am involved in the following research projects.

Running Projects

2025-2030: ERC Consolidator Grant 2023 Tools for Protecting Data and Function Privacy (PRIVTOOLS) funded by ERC

2014-2026: Cryptography-Based Security Solutions: Enabling Trust in New and Next Generation Computing Environments (CROSSING): collaborative research center funded by DFG

Finished Projects

2020-2025: ERC Starting Grant 2019 Privacy-preserving Services On The Internet (PSOTI) funded by ERC

2019-2024: Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users: research training group funded by DFG

2021-2023: Private AI Collaborative Research Institute funded by Intel/Avast/VMware, project "Engineering Private AI Systems (EPAI)"

2019-2022: National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE funded by BMBF & HMWK

2015-2019: Center for Research in Security and Privacy (CRISP) funded by BMBF & HMWK

2013-2016: Privacy-Preserving Computation in the Cloud (PRACTICE) funded by EU FP7

2012-2016: Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED) funded by LOEWE

2012-2015: European Center for Security and Privacy by Design (EC SPRIDE) funded by BMBF

2011: Trustworthy Clouds (TClouds) funded by EU FP7

2008-2013: European Network of Excellence in Cryptology (ECRYPT II) funded by EU FP7

2008-2010: Computer Aided Cryptography Engineering (CACE) funded by EU FP7

2007-2009: Signal Processing in the EncryptEd Domain (SPEED) funded by EU FP6

Honors & Awards

2024: Athene Prize for Good Teaching of the CS Department at TU Darmstadt 2024 for our course Digital Technology

2023: ERC Consolidator Grant 2023 Tools for Protecting Data and Function Privacy (PRIVTOOLS), funding volume 2 Mio EUR, success rate 14.5%

2023: Prize for Best Exercise at the CS Department at TU Darmstadt in SS23 for our course Cryptographic Protocols (CRYPROT)

2021:  8. German IT-Security Award (2. prize). Our submission "ContactGuard: Mobile Private Contact Discovery" won the 2. prize (60,000 EUR) among 46 submissions.

2019: ERC Starting Grant 2019 Privacy-preserving Services On The Internet (PSOTI), funding volume 1.5 Mio EUR, success rate 13.1%

2019: Research Award by Intel Corporation for research on “Secure and Privacy Preserving AI Frameworks and Run-Times for Data Scientists and Service Providers”

2016: Finalist 6. German IT-Security Award. Our submission "Praktikable Private Schnittmengenberechnung" was among the 11 finalists selected from 45 submissions.

2012: Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program Award

2012: Science Award for Young Academics of the Society for Data Protection and Data Security (Gesellschaft für Datenschutz und Datensicherheit e.V. - GDD)

2011: Finalist CAST PhD Award IT Security

2008-2011: Ruhr-University Bochum Graduate Research School Fellow

2008: Finalist CAST B.Sc. Award IT Security

2008: ASQF Sponsorship Award for excellent studies

2007-2008: Fellow Leonardo-Kolleg at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

2007: Best B.Sc. (Vordiplom) at Department of Computer Science, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

2004-2008: Scholar German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes)

2003-2008: Scholar Bavarian Elite Program (BayBFG)

2003: Finalist and Laureate of 21. German Informatics Contest (Bundeswettbewerb Informatik)